While Democracy is Sinking, the Band Plays on

One of the great benefits of a modern civil democracy is the privilege of ignoring the government and its leaders. But this could be our downfall.

As the Titanic went down, couples dressed in evening attire and strolled the deck. The band famously continued to play, stewards served drinks, and new hands were dealt in card games.

“There was no commotion, no panic. People did not believe the ship could sink,” wrote Lawrence Beesley, a 2nd-class passenger in his 1912 book, The Loss of the Titanic. “ They walked about laughing and joking, as if it were all a kind of lark.”

“We could hardly believe that anything serious could be the matter,” stewardess Violet Jessop described the scene. “The ship was so steady, it was difficult to realize there was any danger. People walked about as if nothing had happened.”

So it is in America today. As the pillars of American democratic civil society crumble around us, there is a deep human need to deny the apparent, to seek the comforts of the illusion of normalcy. Gradualism is a greater asset to the autocrat than tanks in the street. The latter is difficult to ignore, while the former is the opium of denial.

As Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die, “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders … More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.”

One of the great benefits of a modern civil democracy is the privilege of ignoring the government and its leaders. For most Americans, our lives revolve around family, school, work, church, neighbors, and personal passions, from the spectacle of college football to playing pickleball. Until there is some disruptive event that forces the government to intersect with our lives – from a natural disaster to ICE rounding up neighbors or co-workers – we assume the luxury of the assumption of normalcy.